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Guild Wars

About Richard Bland

Richard is an English pro
player. He started playing Magic on a foreign exchange trip to Germany
in the dark days of Darksteel, and was running sick homebrew Shared Fate
decks at FNM while everyone else was playing affinity mirrors. While he
has learned better since then, he still retains a soft spot for combo
decks of all hues.

Platinum Pro Player

98 Lifetime Pro Points

2nd Worlds 2011

2nd GP San Diego 2011

3rd GP Barcelona 2011

3rd GP Madrid 2010

2nd Great Britain Nationals 2010

Guild Wars

Hello everyone,

The release of the new set
draws ever nearer and the Return to Ravnica pre-release will be a rather unique
experience compared to other pre-releases with the special Guild Boosters
unique to the events. For those unaware, you get 5 boosters of Return to
Ravnica and a booster of the guild of your choice, and a guild promo card
you’re allowed to play. Making decisions is not something I tend to do lightly,
so the question of where my allegiance lay was not an easy one. Which guild was
I?

To find out, I decided to
look back through my Magic-playing history and the decks I’ve played over the
years and see which guild I’ve turned to most often through my almost
decade-long playing career.

Combo decks have always
been a favorite of mine, so when Matt Nass’ combo elves deck took down an
Extended Grand Prix the weekend before an extended PTQ, I knew I wanted to play
it. The UK PTQ scene has improved over the past few years, and it’s certainly
not the case as much anymore, but playing last week’s best new deck was often
enough to gain a huge advantage over the slower-moving metagame. After losing
the first round to a deck that played a turn 1 Chalice of the Void for one in game
one, I swept the rest of the tournament and took home the blue envelope. The
deck was amusingly complicated to play, and scored a lot of free wins from
unaware opponents. Being able to draw your deck with a combination of
Elves, Cloudstone Curio and Glimpse of Nature was tons of fun, eventually
winning by playing your deck onto the table in one turn and Primal Commanding
all their lands to the top of their deck.

A GW deck I’d rather forget
was another extended deck, Summoning Trap in Worlds 2010. The idea of the deck
was solid. Play out 3 mana guys, activate Windbrisk Heights or cast Summoning Trap and hit either Primeval Titan to get more Hideaway lands or Emrakul, the Aeons Torn into play. A foolproof plan. The reality was somewhat different.
After a dream start in the team rounds with my turn 2 creature being Mana Leaked allowing me to Trap into Emrakul in the very first game, the wheels fell
off with hideaways into nothing and mulligans into Emrakul leaving me 0-4 in
the first 4 rounds and struggling to maintain my pro level for the year. I made
it at 1-4-1, but I swore never again to play a combo deck with no good tutoring
or redundancy.

Golgari

Golgari is a guild themed
around graveyard recursion and reuse of resources. In constructed play
Green/Black decks also tend to follow these themes, leading either to graveyard
based combo, or grinding midrange decks that try to out-resource the opponent
using their inherent card-advantage cards and 1-for-1’s. I am of course,
talking about Rock decks.

Rock has never been a favorite
of mine. I just don’t like decks where you have to draw the right cards at the
right time in every matchup. Card selection was something GB decks tended to
lack. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever played a straight Green/Black deck at a
high-level tournament. So instead enjoy one of my favorite decks from the
Ravnica/TimeSpiral era, Tarmo-rack, which placed my friend Marco Orsini Jones
in the UK National team that year.

This deck was beautifully
disruptive, with piles of grinding card advantage discard spells, the powerful Tarmogoyf, Dark Confidant and The Rack to really put the hurt on the popular
slower tap-out control decks like Angelfire and Blink-Touch, while still being
able to deal with the little guys with Funeral Charm and Ravenous Rats
providing surprising utility. Treetop Village is a staple of Rock decks,
providing a free threat that you’re happy to just beat down your opponent with
after resolving a huge Death Cloud, or simply trading off removal and creatures
until you’re both empty-handed.

Azorius

Ahh, Blue/White. So many
powerful and exciting decks have come from these classic controlling colors.
I’ve played a good number of UW decks in my time, though I didn’t always like
the color combination. I don’t need to tell you that I’ve played a good amount
of UW Delver in the past months, and the summer of CawBlade is still a fresh
and painful memory to many players. My all-time favorite UW deck, however came
from an entirely different format. Zendikar Block Constructed was an odd beast.
Mono-Red was the deck tipped to perform before the tournament began, with Staggershock, Kiln Fiend and Kargan Dragonlord sure to do well. R/U/G stole the
spotlight for the tournament thanks to PV and others doing very well with the
ancestor to the Standard RUG deck that put me into the top 8 of GP Barcelona,
but the deck our team favored was one of the most fun decks I’ve ever played.
U/W Eldrazi control was a strange beast. It had board control with Day of Judgment
and Oust against creature decks, and an almost unstoppable lategame plan of
Kozilek and Ulamog to win the U/W control mirror matches. Oh, and it ran some
4-cc Planeswalker that was apparently pretty good or something. So powerful a
trump were the Eldrazi, that I overheard one teammate saying to his opponent
sadly ‘please don’t scoop, I want to Annihilate you’.

Another fond U/W memory I
have is of the slow-as-molasses but Juggernaut strong Reveillark deck. A dog to
Faeries, but so powerful against any strategy that let it start dropping 4’s
and 5’s uncontested. And with a combo finish that could beat any deck, you
could never count out the lark deck. Here’s Pascal Vieren’s Nationals-winning
list. Possibly the decklist containing the most 2-ofs ever? If you know of one
with more I’d like to see it.

UW seems to always be a
contender in any format, but what about the color combination makes it so good?
The decks featuring them don’t all fit under one banner of control or tempo, so
is it simply that Blue and White tend to get the most powerful and
complimentary cards? Perhaps. The true UW gold cards are surprisingly weak
compared to the offerings of other color combinations. Geist of Saint Traft is
a recent exception to this, but any Cube builder will tell you that UW is one
of the harder gold card slots to fill with powerful cards. Hopefully Return to
Ravnica will fix that without making UW too powerful. A tough ask, but we shall
see.

Rakdos

You might be forgiven for
thinking that Red/Black is a color combination reserved for the beginners and
the bad decks, the obvious aggro deck at the beginning of the constructed
season that is quickly overshadowed by better, faster, more reliable and skill
intensive decks. In some ways you might be right. I’ve found myself drawn to
Red/Black on a surprising number of occasions, and none of them have turned out
all that well for me. I played Blightning and Ashenmoor Gouger at Nationals in
2009, where I lost playing for top 8 in part due to my mediocre Standard
record.

More recently, Rakdos has
become much more legitimate as a Black deck splashing red than a red deck
splashing black. Black/Red Zombies and Black/Red Vampires are two recent
examples of this trend, with one-mana black 2/2’s supported by red burn and
very good manabases, we get Rakdos decks with both good spells and good
creatures, which has often been the stumbling block of previous iterations.
Sorry Goblin Outlander, you really weren’t that great in retrospect. Here’s a
deck where the 2 power guys only cost a single mana and the cards have actual
synergy rather than being an assortment of cards that were the best in their
mana slot.

Izzet

For a guild of enemy colors,
Izzet decks make a surprisingly large number of appearances in my play history.
Traditionally combo colors, Red and blue mix fast mana and card selection and a
love of instants and sorceries, creating well-known combo decks like Storm, Pyromancer Ascension, Splinter Twin, Dragonstorm and Seismic Swans to name a
few. One of my first Pro Tour successes, way back at Pro Tour Berlin was with
UR Grapeshot Storm, which earned me a spot in the money despite only being the
second best combo deck in the room. A few Pyroclasms in the sideboard actually
gave me a somewhat anomalous winning record against the Elves! Decks that
dominated that Pro Tour.

UR isn’t just for combo
decks; they do a good job at control too in certain formats. Ravnica/Kamigawa
Standard was one of those formats and it allowed the formation of one of my all-time
favorite decks – U/R Izzetron. It had it all: Big mana, Remand & Compulsive Research, two of my favorite cards ever, efficient removal and sweepers in Electrolyze
and Pyroclasm and huge finishers in Keiga, the Tide Star and Invoke the Firemind.

The question of which guild
to pick becomes a lot clearer for me after all that, and at the Pre-release I
will be representing the Izzet faction and overloading my opponents’ defenses
with powerful spells and the amazingly efficient Hypersonic Dragon. At least I
will be for the first flight; I hear the drumbeat of the Rakdos calling out to
me once again, and Red/Black does have so much lovely removal...

Thanks for reading and have
fun at your pre-release, whichever guild you choose,

Comments

Overload sure looks like a good mechanic, allowing you to get more value on spells by letting you make them go wider; however I have not seen so many great Izzet spoilers to the date. Your guild pick was by considering what history has offered for RU or by what you can see an fathom of Return to Ravnica so far?

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